Craig EllisonCoPilot Live Laptop 9CoPilot Live Laptop 9 is a premium-priced notebook-based navigation system, but its many unique features such as 3D view, driver safety mode, and "live" mode make it a compelling product.

CoPilot Live Laptop 9 is a premium-priced notebook-based navigation system, but its many unique features such as 3D view, driver safety mode, and "live" mode make it a compelling product.

At $299 (list), ALK's CoPilot Live Laptop 9 is the most expensive of the laptop-based GPS packages PC Magazine has reviewed. Like Microsoft's Streets & Trips and Delorme's Street Atlas USA 2006, CoPilot Laptop 9 comes with a USB 2.0 receiver. The receiver is based on the new SiRF Star III GPS chipset, whose technology won a PC Magazine Technical Excellence award in 2005. A version of the product with a Bluetooth GPS receiver ($299 list) is also available, as is a software-only version ($199 list).

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Unlike the Delorme and Microsoft products, Laptop 9 requires product activation; you can use it without activation for just three days. You can install it both on the laptop that you'll be using for navigation and on a second system for trip planning. ALK provides a means of deactivating the license so that you can move the software to another system.

The "live" component of Laptop 9 clearly differentiates it from the competition. If your notebook has a live Internet connection while you're navigating, you can let your friends track your progress. You create an account on live.alk.com, enable the live connection on your notebook, and send your friends an e-mail invitation. ALK generates a link to a Web site that will show your current position. Through this interface, they can also communicate with you as you drive by asking a question and providing a choice of up to four possible answers. We recently tracked a coworker on his cross-country trek using the live feature. It worked well as long as the notebook had an Internet connection.

CoPilot Live includes a number of options for voice-prompted directions. You can choose from ten language options (U.S., U.K., or Australian English and German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, or Danish). For English-language selections, you can also choose between prerecorded speech files or text-to-speech conversion. Text-to-speech will provide more extensive directions and will pronounce the street names for upcoming turns. Non-English selections provide only prerecorded speech files. A new feature in Laptop 9 allows you to replace the prerecorded voice files with your own files or to download new voice sets as they become available.

CoPilot Live has two operating modes: planning and navigating. You don't need to have a GPS receiver attached to use the planning mode. Each mode includes an icon for switching to the other mode. The planning mode lets you create, edit, save, and print your trips. With the TravPak printing option, you can choose to print a cover page with trip summary information, a trip overview map, maps of starting and intermediate destination points, detailed turn-by-turn directions, and so forth.

In both planning and guidance modes, you have a number of options for creating a trip. You can choose to navigate to an address or a Point of Interest (POI), to a saved "Favorite" place, or to an address in your Microsoft Outlook database. In the navigating mode, you can also add an intersection as a stop or a destination. And finally, in a feature that will appeal to geocachers (GPS treasure hunters), you can set a latitude and longitude as a destination. As with Microsoft Streets & Trips 2006, you can also have CoPilot optimize trips with multiple stops.

Laptop 9 has two vehicle profiles: Auto and RV. The RV vehicle profile minimizes routes on narrow roads and ones that would require tight turns or U-turns. In the U.S., it will also avoid highways with bridge heights less than 12 feet, 6 inches. For either vehicle type, you can choose the quickest, shortest, or most scenic route and choose to avoid tolls or propane-restricted tunnels. You can also set speed limits for freeways; divided, primary, and secondary highways; and even for local streets. You can save those settings in a Road Preference Profile to apply to future trips.

In the guidance mode, as with the Microsoft and Delorme products, you have the option of displaying maps either as 2D North up and 2D Track up. Laptop 9 adds a 3D view. The 3D view is found in many dedicated hardware GPS devices and is a welcome addition. The navigation mode also includes a driver-safety view. When this view is selected, at speeds above 10 MPH the display switches to a summary screen that shows your next turn in large type, a large graphic showing the direction of your next turn, and a snapshot of the map for your next turn, as well as data from three user-selectable fields (such as heading, speed, and time to destination). This summary view gives the driver all the pertinent information for the next turn at just a glance.

In our road tests, we found that Laptop 9 generated good directions and never lost satellite lock. Our preference was for the text-to-speech directions, which pronounced the street names, and the male ("John") voice. When we made intentional errors during navigation, CoPilot quickly recovered with freshly generated directions. We were disappointed that the POI database in our sampling had fewer entries than either of the other products. But Laptop 9 now has the ability to import third-party POI data in OV2 format.

The CoPilot responds to voice instructions, but Delorme's Street Atlas consistently did a better job of recognizing spoken commands. ALK recommends using a noise-canceling microphone, and an external microphone improves recognition. But Street Atlas had no problem recognizing voice commands using the built-in microphone in our IBM ThinkPad T40 testbed.

CoPilot Live Laptop 9 is a premium-priced notebook-based navigation system, but its many unique features, such as 3D view, driver-safety mode, and "live" mode, make it a compelling product.

CoPilot Live Laptop 9

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